The Haiku project is participating in this year's "Semester of Code" (SoC) of the European VALS project. The SoC is similar to Google's GSoC, but without the financial incentive and more emphasis on the educational side.

Its goal is to connect higher education students with open source projects to introduce them to the cooperative nature of working within a group on a bigger project. For Haiku, besides potentially extending its feature set, it's another opportunity to spark the interest of new, eager developers with a chance to gain future regular contributors.

So, one of the changes made last week (the XMLHTTPRequest timeout support) led to an API breakage in the network kit. This made WebKit crash on starting WebPositive, and I had to make an "emergency" release during the weekend to fix this. While you can enjoy the new shiny features and the bugfixes, you will also notice it is rather slow and uses a lot of CPU. This is a known issue related to the fixes with redrawing frames, which needed to remove some optimizations. I'll try to reintroduce those in a way that doesn't involve drawing problems.

This week most of my work went into improving our HTML5 support in WebKit. A lot of small issues and relatively simple features had piled up on my TODO list, and there weren't too much new bug reports so I spent some time to fix those. Here is a quick review of the features I added support for this week.

As usual, after the 1.4.4 release there were some new bug reports for me to work on. So the first part of the week was spent investigating and fixing some of those.

Several problems were fixed in the video code, which are leading to deadlocks and/or crashes of WebKit after a video is done playing.

A problem with text not being drawn (seen for example on Trac) was fixed. This is apparently a new bug introduced on WebKit side, where small text with shadows ends up not being drawn at all. I'm not sure my fix is completely correct, but it seems to work.

Update: Jessica raised the funds she needs, thanks to everyone who supported her!

Just a quick note to mention that Jessica Hamilton is raising money to fund a trip to this year's GSoC Reunion. She was one of our selected mentor delegates assigned to attend.

It turns out that the reimbursements from Google are not going to be enough to cover all of her travel costs, and she otherwise can't afford to go.

She has decided to setup a fundraiser to raise the extra funds she needs. I believe this is a fair amount requested ($850 NZD, ~$700 USD), and I think it would be great if she could attend a GSoC summit event on behalf of Haiku.

She'll need to book her tickets soon, as the trip is just over a month from now - so don't wait!

Yesterday I released version 1.4.4 of HaikuWebKit. This version includes the latest fixes to the rendering code and should be completely useable again. There are still a few drawing issues but they shouldn't prevent you to browse the web anymore.

This week most of my time was spent on debugging. My new machine is running fine, and now building WebKit takes a little more than an hour, which is much better than the 4 hours I was getting on the old laptop. With a 4 thread CPU machine some concurrency and locking issues became much easier to reproduce. This led to identifying and fixing a bug in our BSecureSocket class, which was not properly setting up SSL for thread-safe operation. I think this will fix most of the remaining memory corruption problems.